Botnets on rise in Africa

Spam isn't taking a holiday in the upcoming summer season. According to the latest information from MessageLabs, spam is just getting started. The new report finds that 90% of all email is now spam, more botnets are getting set in Africa and malware is now focusing on the upcoming Soccer World Cup events. Here is the break-down:

• 90.1% of email is now spam, an increase of 0.2% since April
• 1 in every 211 emails now has a virus
• 1 in every 237 emails is a phishing scam
• 90% of spam messages also have a hyperlink or URL
• Roughly 5 Autonomous System Numbers (ASN's, basically network identifiers) are used for 40% of spam domains

These hyperlinks and URLs within spam messages are some of the most detrimental to consumers, who may not realize from the shortened URL or the Typo-URL that they're actually clicking through to a fraudulent company intent on harming them.